The Spa 24 Hours has seen plenty of change since its first iteration in 1924, one year after the inaugural around-the-clock event at Le Mans, and not just to its famous undulating ribbon of tarmac. The event formed part of the SportsCar World Championship in 1953 and 1981, but for most of its history, it was a touring car event as the European Touring Car Championship’s crown jewel before taking on its current guise as a GT race in 2001.
The onset of the GT3 era a decade later has bumped its appeal up a notch or two, as the biggest GT3-only event going regularly draws a bumper grid of 60-plus cars that are all capable of producing the same lap time depending on their calibre of drivers.
Whereas Le Mans recently endured several years of minimal manufacturer representation in the top class, the Spa 24 Hours hasn’t faced the same issue with outright wins spread around between five different manufacturers since 2011. Audi and BMW lead the way on four, Mercedes and Porsche have two apiece while Ferrari scored its first since 2004 with its stunning late triumph in 2021.
Given its years of tin-top domination, BMW has comfortably the most wins of any manufacturer in the race’s history, so perhaps it was only fitting that a third win this year made Philipp Eng the most successful driver of the closely-fought GT3 era so far. Only Eric van de Poele (five), plus four-time winners Jean-Michel Martin and Thierry Tassin, have won it more than the amiable Austrian, a part of the lineup every time a BMW has crossed the line first since his maiden triumph in 2016.
Each has been with different team-mates too. He was joined in the winning M4 GT3 this year by Nick Yelloly and Marco Wittmann, Eng’s second victory for the Rowe team with which he gave the M6 GT3 its first major accolade in 2016 alongside Martin’s nephew Maxime and Alexander Sims. The now 33-year-old also prevailed in a one-off entry fielded by Nurburgring specialist Walkenhorst in 2018 with Tom Blomqvist and Christian Krognes, a result that put the team firmly on the map.
Eng’s record is perhaps even more impressive given he’s not entered the race every year, putting his conversion rate with BMW at three wins from five starts (his first with McLaren pro-am team MRS GT Racing in 2013 ended in a DNF). So, what is his secret?
“I don’t want to tap my own shoulder, but you could also say that every time I finished this race I won it,” he tells Autosport. “We had an issue in 2017 at the first pitstop where the wheelhub broke, so we were laps down very early in the race. And in 2020 one of my team-mates had a crash.
“It’s so easy to say and we keep telling the same thing over and over again – in every 24-hour race, you just have to minimise the amount of mistakes and minimise the amount of time spent in pitlane, which wasn’t particularly the case for us this year because we had this refuelling issue early in the race.
“I cannot really tell you. I just like this place and I like the track. But there are so many drivers who like this track too! Sitting here right now talking to you, it feels like a very big honour to have won this race three times because it’s, with the Nurburgring, I would say the most difficult race to win.”
"I didn’t really know what to expect, being with a manufacturer. BMW gave me the trust to sign me up and to win this race in my first year as a works driver was very special" Philipp Eng
Eng wasn’t immediately aware that he’d pulled free of the group of GT3 era double winners comprising Rene Rast, Markus Winkelhock, Laurens Vanthoor and Jules Gounon who each scored at least one of their victories in an Audi. Instead, he says one of his first thoughts was of delight for team-mate Wittmann, “moreover for him being my friend also”, as his karting rival from the age of 10 got to celebrate the first 24-hour win of a glittering career that to date has yielded two DTM titles.
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“At least when it comes down to my own statistics, I’m quite bad,” reveals Eng. “I am doing the F1 commentary for Austrian TV [with Servus] and for some strange reason I am very good on statistics in F1, but when it comes down to my own statistics, I don’t really know.
“I couldn’t tell you – well, now I can tell you because for my latest meeting in BMW, I added up how many races I did for BMW and how many races I won and how many podiums. But before that meeting, I had zero idea!
Like Rast and Gounon, Eng is a product of one-make Porsche racing which has long been a proving ground for top sportscar talents. Two German Carrera Cup titles, combining his 2015 success with the Supercup championship, caught the attention of BMW and he became a factory driver for 2016.
But the M6 GT3 was a limited weapon at the majority of circuits on the Blancpain Endurance Series calendar and proved commercially unsuccessful in customer racing, with few Am drivers able to get the best from it. As ex-BMW works driver Sims puts it: “The M6 was clearly brilliant in fifth and sixth gear corners, it was pretty much the best GT car. But in first and second gear corners it was clearly the worst GT car I would say.”
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However, the M6 package was well-suited to Spa, and Eng rewarded BMW’s faith with a faultless drive at Spa together with Sims and Martin as the Mercedes that dominated qualifying were delayed by five-minute penalties (due to non-confirming ignition maps) shortly after the start, while Bentley’s lead car was dogged by operational errors.
“I didn’t really know what to expect, being with a manufacturer,” Eng admits. “BMW gave me the trust to sign me up and to win this race in my first year as a works driver was very special for myself because I realised that I had what it takes to win that race, which was very cool.”
After placing a disappointing 33rd with Sims and Martin in 2017, due to the aforementioned wheelhub delay, Eng’s primary programme for 2018 was in the DTM. But in what was “a very last-minute decision to run that car in that race”, he joined Walkenhorst for its first time fielding a Pro entry at Spa and beat the Rowe M6 of Sims, Nicky Catsburg and Jens Klingmann by just 10.4s as warmer temperatures in the latter stages swung the balance in Eng’s favour for his marathon closing stint.
“It was a very small team back then and they only had experience at the Nurburgring Nordschleife,” he recalls. “To win with an operation like that felt very cool. I think as a team they absolutely exceeded everybody’s expectations. We rolled her out of the truck and she was immediately fast.”
Eng missed Spa in 2019 when he added a partial IMSA schedule to his DTM programme and made a second appearance as a third driver in BMW’s short-lived World Endurance Championship programme with the M8, but his 2020 Spa 24 return wasn’t a memorable one. Contact while Catsburg was at the wheel of their Walkenhorst M6 caused heavy damage to the front end and radiator that put paid to any hopes of a result before necessitating retirement.
He then skipped each of the past two editions of the 24 Hours as the M6 gave way to the M4, which Eng campaigned last year in the DTM. But this year both Eng and Yelloly combined racing BMW’s RLL-run M Hybrid V8 GTP car in the IMSA Sportscar Championship with a full campaign for Rowe in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup – Eng’s first since 2016 – which meant their preparation for Spa was immaculate.
Having “sorted the car out very well in pre-season testing”, Eng, Yelloly and Wittmann broke the M4’s series duck at the first time of asking at Monza, then finished third in the Paul Ricard 1000km. By the time they reached Spa, Eng says the crew had an intrinsic understanding of each other’s requirements.
“I know Nick and Marco so well when they come out of the car and say ‘it’s oversteering two out of five’, I know exactly how much oversteer there is in the car,” he says. “I know exactly what my direct team-mates feel and what they need from the car to go faster.”
Although they came away with the desired result, the 24 Hours itself didn’t run entirely smoothly for the #99 Rowe crew. Starting 26th, the M4 didn’t take on enough fuel at either of its first two pitstops due to a problem with the connector on the end of the hose and dropped a lap down. But the response couldn’t be faulted as it fought back to beat ASP’s Mercedes that eventually won the Endurance Cup title by 11s.
"When I did Class 1 DTM, I was always involved in GT programmes because I really like the races, I really like the cars, and maybe I’m a driver who can cope better with it" Philipp Eng
“Put it this way, I was quite relaxed when I knew [Eng] was doing the last double stint that he’d been in that situation before with a little lead,” remembers Yelloly, who clocked a second 24-hour race victory for BMW after his 2020 Nurburgring 24 success.
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The dual campaign in 2023 for Yelloly, Eng and his full-season IMSA team-mate Augusto Farfus, as part of the GTWCE lineup with Valentino Rossi and Maxime Martin at WRT, comes against the backdrop of BMW’s imminent return to the WEC in the top class with Vincent Vosse’s team. And it poses some interesting questions.
As BMW seeks to derive the maximum return from its investment in a first prototype racer since its 1999 Le Mans-winning V12 LMR, will conquering Le Mans outright take priority over the GT3 classics in determining how its drivers are deployed? Will the complexity of the new breed of Hypercars demand that prototype drivers give it their total attention? How would doing so impact performances if prototype drivers were to jump in for one-offs in the big GT3 enduros? Would a fuller campaign be necessary to still be on the pace, and will the drivers be given some say in any of these decisions?
Of course, these aren’t only questions that will be pondered around boardroom tables in Munich. Lamborghini for instance will have the same quandary with DTM runner-up Mirko Bortolotti and his full season Iron Lynx GTWCE team-mate Andrea Caldarelli ahead of its arrival into the Hypercar ranks next year.
Some have argued that Hypercars are less complex than their LMP1 forebearers, which explains Toyota’s willingness for its WEC drivers to get extra mileage in IMSA in recent seasons. But when it comes to manufacturers stepping up from the GT ranks to Hypercar as BMW has done, there are some interesting points of reference.
Ferrari only had Nicklas Nielsen and Antonio Fuoco from its Hypercar contingent on duty at Spa, while Porsche’s sole LMDh representatives in Belgium were Vanthoor and Kevin Estre as Weissach’s entire IMSA roster had the weekend off. It was a different story at the Nurburgring 24 however, where Matt Campbell, Mathieu Jaminet, Michael Christensen and Fred Makowiecki joined Vanthoor and Estre in tackling the Green Hell. As for BMW, its entire IMSA cohort including Eng, Farfus and Yelloly shared an M4 that failed to finish when Connor de Philippi incurred damage.
Eng has enjoyed the best of both worlds in 2023, and his recent victory in the Indianapolis 8 Hour round of the Intercontinental GT Challenge means he enters December’s 12-hour Yas Marina finale just eight points off championship leader Gounon. But there are no guarantees Eng will do so again next year, although he’s clear that his preference is to race as much as possible.
“My opinion on that is that the more you drive as a racing driver, the better you get,” Eng says, citing his adaptability as “an asset that I have”.
“Some drivers can cope better with a double programme and some cope worse, or they don’t even want to do it. I can’t speak for others but I’m definitely happy with the programme I have with BMW doing also all sorts of GT3 races.
“Also when I did Class 1 DTM, I was always involved in GT programmes because I really like the races, I really like the cars, and maybe I’m a driver who can cope better with it. When you look back in my career, we never really had the budget to go racing so I had to drive whatever came up. One day it was a McLaren, one day it was a Porsche, so I felt many different cars and this definitely helps me now to adapt from one car to another.
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“So I would be very happy to do both programmes again next year, but it’s still too early to talk about it.”
His Porsche GTP rival Nick Tandy has an interesting view on the topic too. The 2015 Le Mans winner also has outright wins with GT cars at Spa (2020) and the Nurburgring (2018), and says “I don't see it being a problem for the best drivers” being able to combine prototypes with GT cars.
“Especially if you've already got experience of racing a lot of GT stuff at the events, say like a Spa or a Nurburgring, I think it's still possible to come back in for a one-off event and try and go for the win,” he tells Autosport.
Yelloly reckons that jumping in for a one-off at Spa, “you would struggle more than if you did the whole season”, a point Eng broadly agrees with. For success at Spa, “it always helps when you’re doing the full season”, he says, before immediately countering that 2018 was “a pure one-off, I hadn’t driven that Pirelli tyre at all that year, so it can also work like this”.
Eng describes an IMSA campaign that peaked with fourth at Long Beach as “an up-and-down rollercoaster”. Neither he nor Farfus had done a full season in the US prior to 2023, so both had to learn most of the tracks for the first time, while the BMW LMDh programme itself only began in earnest with a rollout at the end of July 2022 which left the RLL team with plenty of catching up to do relative to the competition.
"I’ve won in Daytona [the GTLM class in 2019], I tried three times in Le Mans, so yes I have won Spa three times but there are many more races and many more 24-hour races to win" Philipp Eng
On top of that, their #24 BMW bore the brunt of reliability woes. Cooling problems forced retirement at Sebring and electrical gremlins struck both at Road America and Indianapolis, the former ending in retirement and the latter a lengthy delay. The most frustrating non-finish was arguably at Watkins Glen, when Farfus lost control on the opening lap with cold tyres, souring a day that BMW’s pace was rewarded with victory for Yelloly and de Philippi’s sister car.
Therefore, conquering prototypes is unfinished business for Eng, who gives a clue as to his priorities should he be forced to choose when Autosport broaches the topic of van de Poele’s outright record being in his sights.
“I mean no, not really,” he replies when asked if it’s something he’s actively targeting. “I want to win as many races as possible and on the other hand I’ve tried so many times to win at the Nurburgring and it just didn’t happen for me personally.
“I’ve won in Daytona [the GTLM class in 2019], I tried three times in Le Mans, so yes I have won Spa three times but there are many more races and many more 24-hour races to win.”
Where the Spa 24 Hours’ modern king is concerned, a racing car is a racing car. And that’s a refreshing attitude to have.
